by Mark Ellis
Here was an end befitting Barb Stamen’s obsession with death. Photographs would be
taken and eventually circulated to become internet sensations. Perhaps even on Deathknell, should anyone inherit the site from the corpse that lay before him.
There was a commotion at the entrance to the sauna center. Hundtruk factored quickly that Centavos had spilled her guts. Too late, he murmured to himself.
What Hundtruk assumed to be Blythe’s bullet had entered Stamen’s chest about five inches from her shoulder. She might have lived, had medical help been summoned in time. For whatever reason it hadn’t, and the narrative had been rescued for his federal bosses, the Democratic Party, and President Barack Obama.
It was messier than anyone would have liked, but resolution in the Svenko case would forever after have Hundtruk’s name all over it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Melissa jumped up from where she’d knelt slurping remnants of dirty snow atop an open slope of the island that had rescued her from a hypothermic grave. About one mile out on Disenchantment Bay, the Northstar was coming straight on, making steady progress. Scrabbling quickly down to shore was her first instinct, but the thought struck her that it was probably best that she was elevated. It seemed as if she was in a perfect sight line to the bridge. She felt so visible at the top of that stubbly clearing, she thought it must be impossible that someone on the ship would not see her.
But as the navy-blue hull trolled closer in waters turning bluer with each increment of sunrise, she realized there were two things working against her. First, the searchlights, which grew less and less necessary in the fullness of dawn, were directed downward. So would be the eyes of every deckhand on the ship.
Second, she knew enough about natural cover to know that her brown-beige pantsuit would blend invisibly against the bracken scrub and dirt clefts of the treeless slope. A sharp-eyed deck runner, perhaps Dan Waldenburg himself, might look right at her and not see her. Even through binoculars, her pasted brown hair and dun suit would be lost against the army brown at the threshold of the uplands.
It seemed that the Northstar was slowing. Had they seen her? But the slowdown proved an illusion, created by what was actually the slow turning of the ship. Melissa understood; the depths surrounding her lifeboat isle were not so deep as to allow the Northstar to come any closer.
Against all logic, she found herself yelling. “Hey!” The deep quiet that fell when she stopped yelling encouraged her to yell again, louder. From somewhere downslope, a familiar cawing came, answering her yells. She wondered whether the bird mocked her or was assisting in her cries for help. She stopped, worried the yells might turn to screams. Melissa’s stomach growled and sweat broke on her goose-pimpled skin. The ship was inexorably turning. They were leaving her. To be seen, she must provide contrast—striking contrast.
She kicked off her shoes and stripped off the clammy pantsuit, desperate to reveal her bare flesh against the dark entrance to the forest. In bra and panties, gulping breaths, she began to run, up from the sparse snowbank, breaking toward the tree line, an animal running to a place where the opposite of protective coloration might save it. Within seconds she was at the highest edge of the meadow, behind her the mystery of wooded depths. The ship was sidelong to her now.
Jumping jacks.
That’s the crazy, desperate move her body inspired her to make. Jumping jacks, her breasts bobbing, her legs widening, her hands joining for a hard clap over her head, like an ivory puppet dancing at the shadowline of forest. She jumped and jacked as if her life depended on it.
She stopped her mad calisthenics. They had not seen her, and the ship’s turn was accomplished. She was alone again, but for the siren bird and whatever creatures lived on the glacier island.
She had water to drink in the snow she’d found. How this crusty, soiled drift had survived to July was a wonder, but then, all the mountains around her were snowcapped at their highest elevations. Later she could lay her clothes out on some rocks to dry. They would send search planes, choppers. There was always the chance that old-salt Captain Squier would send a launch to the island.
Hubbard Glacier had finally shaken its foggy encumbrance, revealing high frozen cliffs that met the strait. A great time-lapsed wall of ice, tan like malted milk in the crevasses, translucent like bubbles in amber on the sun-kissed rim, ice blue where no heat or dust ever reached.
The prospect of utter failure presented itself, forcefully enough so that it seemed all Melissa’s previous ruminations about failure had grossly underestimated her ability to screw up. She’d waited too long to apprehend her suspect, and at the crucial moment she should have been prepared for, she’d allowed her prey to get the upper hand. She briefly considered indulging in the habit of giving oneself the break that Cape Lookout’s law enforcement program hoped to instill in its graduates. After all, she had deduced the perpetrator of Svenko’s murder, and wasn’t there something of value in that? Captain Squier would certainly suspect Barb Stamen when news of Melissa’s disappearance reached the bridge. Even if Melissa’s Glock hadn’t found its target and Stamen was unhurt, the decision to let the captain in on her Svenko theory ensured that Deathknell’s missing proprietress would emerge as the prime suspect. Perhaps the best that Melissa would be able to salvage from the assignment, should she survive her own ineptitude, was that her near death at the hands of Stamen was proof positive of Stamen’s guilt.
Stranded on this lonely island, such exculpatory self-talk resonated as emptily as her desperate cries across this vast bay. She imagined that not even Scrimshaw’s wildest dreams could have foreseen how badly Melissa’s shakedown cruise would turn out. And the possibilities grew worse upon consideration. It was entirely possible that Stamen would escape free and clear, the way she’d walked after deep-sixing Lara Svenko.
The last thing she saw was a large pod of orcas passing between the island and the Northstar’s retreating aft, looking to do what killer whales do, their dorsal fins cutting the calm of Disenchantment Bay.
Captain Squier, Jeff Griffin. Dan Waldenburg. If only there was a man in her life who could save her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Melissa watched the orcas turn and swarm, as if they’d come upon a school of edible fish. How near they were to where her numbing legs had flailed the night before. The fog was lifting quickly now, and all that was revealed took her breath away. She watched from the top of the clearing as the Northstar and her conservative crew powered away
There was an awful roar from the direction of the glacier.
A tumbling of brown ice, falling like a gargantuan mimic of the sandy banks she’d toppled with her feet at Port Rachel Canal. Great wedges and arrowheads had already splashed up foamy spurts of seawater as high as the gulls flew. For long seconds the last sheerings of ice fell, roiling up the brown blood at the bottom of the bay.
Then quiet. The rumble subsided as quickly as it had come. Along a considerable stretch of the shore, Hubbard’s ice face was cleaner in the morning sun. Squinting, Melissa felt a gust of cool wind that goose-pimpled her exposed stomach and neck. Not sure of what tricks the light might play, she noticed a moving oddity about the Northstar. An abrupt stop-and-climb at the bow, which was strange since the bay seemed calm.
Melissa reached down to the moss beside the snowbank for her damp suit, but her fingers never closed around it. The Northstar was again moving toward the island, exactly backward, its stern flags fluttering ass-backward too. Slowly the ship began to turn in the water, the bow swinging ponderously, driven by the sinuous hump of the wave. Navy-blue hull, coming on sideways, so near now that Melissa could see the starboard lifeboats hanging askew in their clasps. A man rolled out from a white archway, saved only by the railing from a tumble into the churning wave. A second man, a crewmember—Melissa registered the colors of the Trans Oceanic uniform—toppled over the main deck rail in a slosh of water. As he went under, she found herself wondering if it might be Dan.
A s
welling hump soundlessly drove the ship right towards the island, so close now that Melissa saw that the One World Pool had tipped and brimmed over into the plaza she had viewed from a small window while Jeff Griffin met with Barb Stamen. Melissa heard a submerged shriek of metal. The wave continued inexorably, but the ship’s progress became irregular, with scraping slows and disjointed starts. A human form, smallish and quite possibly female, became dislodged from a deck rail and fell to what Melissa could only imagine was certain death. She thought she could see frantic activity behind the windows of the bridge.
The tsunami came ashore at the island’s midpoint then, the brunt of it hitting a quiet inlet down from where Melissa had floundered onto the beach. Within seconds the cove was submerged by a wave whose terribleness had been concealed by the depths. The Northstar’s hull rode up the shore, snapping trees, half turning, and then settling down to bob and teeter in the inundated cove.
At that moment the idea crossed Melissa’s mind that she herself might be in danger. She
knew the pyroclastic flow from the Mount Saint Helens eruption had destroyed bridges as far away as the I-5 corridor. Lakes had been utterly buried, waterfalls wiped off the map.
Like water tilting up the side of a tipped basin, the onrush came. Turning, she ran, naked but for her undergarments, running strong for the island’s pinnacle.
Into the forest, over another patch of snow, she slipped, gashing both her knees and embedding pine duff and pebbles into the palms of both hands. She lay on her stomach, panting. The sun was full up, and light broke through to the forest floor in places. Before climbing to her feet, she saw a family of red squirrels scampering to high ground through a sunny shaft.
She picked herself up and ran again in a panic that she realized was always with her now, something chasing her, and chasing after the rest of her life. An end-times stalking, with one impossible truth stalking deeper—the truth that she was alone. That time would go on, that her earthbound drama of love and death glimmered for just a microfraction of the epochs of geologic time. Melissa ran, leaden foot before leaden foot, breaking her own heart to escape.
Just ahead, a ridged meadow. Only the island peak remained to be scaled. Her knees bleeding, her palms burning, she climbed the last mossy embankment, wolfing down desperate grabs of oxygen. She had company across the high meadow, answers to her question about the beasts that dwelled here, squirrels and, a porcupine! She felt suddenly lightheaded, and stumbled, throwing her arms in front of her, then rolled over and lay back against a hollow in the soil.
The sun was shining as if upon any day. A squirrel with long auburn whiskers perched on a nearby log, a nut in his furry-fetal hands, as if outrunning this was just another day in the life of the forest.
More seconds, too many seconds. The wave had crested.
Corporal Darryl Russo felt a rumble under his desk at the Yakutat Bay Coast Guard station. The gray-flecked government-issue carpet beneath his feet was unpadded, so the rumbling shimmied the metal curvature of his wastebasket. From the small communications room behind his post came the sound of something shattering. In the reception area, not really a lobby, a framed photograph of Governor Sarah Palin shook loose and swung hanging off one hook.
Russo factored it for an earthquake of a magnitude not particularly huge or an epicenter not particularly near. The office was preternaturally quiet after the rumble, and he savored the silence. Soon reports would start pouring in, some garbled and some so clear they would seem to be coming from the next room. The chatter always reminded him of the cries of shipwreck survivors, but minutes from now, an official announcement would break though. He’d been through this drill before.
From the silence of distance and pregnant immediacy came the first voice, a voice tinged with what the corporal recognized as borderline shock: “…some kind of disturbance…”
The voice was lost in crackling indecipherability, then another panicked fragment, “I saw a ship, a cruise ship…”
Russo clicked to the USGS seismic center, but there were no alerts, no warnings. Back in the com room, he found that Private First-Class Irene Yamamoto’s coffee mug had fallen off a printer tray, its pieces of Oregon Duck green and gold in shards on the rug. He was turning to go to the utility closet for the shop vac when another frenzied transmission broke the silence.
“…I’m telling you, there’s no way the ship could have avoided…”
After getting the remains of Irene’s prized mug safely into the vacuum, Russo turned again to the business at hand. An email had appeared in his inbox, and as he watched, it was followed in quick succession by five more. The first was from his compatriot officer, Sergeant Eric Sussman, who’d been his noncommissioned mentor during basic training and was now stationed off Kodiak Island:
Anything on the cruise ship Northstar out of Seattle?
The second email, the one he’d been expecting, was from USCG Command:
Reports of a catastrophic calving incident on or near Hubbard Glacier. Campers on northwest shore of Disenchantment Bay report seeing massive section of the glacier fall into the water.
Sightings of a cruise ship in the vicinity. Trans Oceanic line Northstar’s last reported position was in Disenchantment Bay near Haenke Island.
The radio’s swirl of open-channel reports became continuous, and Russo’s inbox was filling rapidly. His cell phone rang—its ringtone sampled Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie.” It was Eric.
“I just got off the phone with a fisherman who says he’s never seen anything like it.”
“What are we looking at?” Russo asked.
“Epic calving is what I’m hearing,” replied Eric.
On any summer day on any given glacier bay, a ship’s captain might reasonably ensure his passengers would get a glimpse of what one hundred tons of raw ice looks like when crumbling into sea. A hundred tons here, a thousand there, all witnessed from a safe distance. There’d been some catastrophic calvings, mostly to be found in the geological record, and in stories passed down by indigenous peoples, campfire tales of flattened forests and whales washed ashore.
The unambiguous voice of North Coast Command broke through the fractured transmissions.
“Catastrophic calving at Hubbard Glacier at 8:46 a.m. PST. Tsunami alert issued. All regional personnel ordered to elevated alert status.”
Navigator Holdren looked from the morning sky to one of his monitors, and Captain Squier heard him say, “Mmm, what’s this?”
Across the face of Hubbard Glacier, it was as if every precipitous icefall Rad had ever witnessed crashed down all at once. He had seen his share of big break-offs, had heard the oohs and aahs of his passengers, and had never gotten over the juxtaposition of collapse and permanence. Now, as Hubbard’s ramparts plummeted into roiling tumult and rising birds, what he saw was like some National Geographic special about something that has never happened in recorded time.
Only moments before the calamitous shearing of the glacier, Captain Squier had been engaged in restorative thoughts about the Rainier Policy Institute’s 2009 cruise. He had hung around through impenetrable fog and given his passengers an experience few people will have in a lifetime. When the unsavory details about lesbian love and murder came out, the conservative cruisers of the defeated Republican Party would have an otherworldly sunrise over Hubbard Glacier to remember.
It wouldn’t take long now, he’d been thinking, with cleared vistas at every compass point, for the powerful choppers of the Coast Guard to begin sweeping the bay, looking for traces of Melissa Blythe, most likely in the form of her corpse. The Northstar would be boarded by top investigators, and Rad would be obliged to return to the nearest jurisdictional port that could handle the bow depth of the ship, Juneau.
Chief Collins had called the bridge to confirm that Maria Centavos was safe in the brig and that sauna tech Barbara Stafford’s body had been delivered to a cold storage berth in the ship’s clinic, one of two available on every cruise. Thanks to the apparent skills of the w
oman who’d interviewed him in a booth at Yukon Pete’s, a woman Rad unhappily concluded was probably dead, a rock-solid tie to the case of Lara Svenko had been established.
Watching the sunrise, Rad had warmly anticipated his homecoming. Nancy was to fly out of Palm Springs three days hence, and by 4:00 p.m. that day, her Cayenne would be sitting next to his Escalade in their Arbor Glen garage. Under normal circumstances, the Northstar would dock at Port of Seattle an hour later. A Trans Oceanic Towne Car customarily delivered him home by 8:00 p.m. But once in Juneau, Alaska’s thorough and notoriously micromanaged authorities would have questions to ask and procedures to follow. It was even possible that some of the same people who worked to capsize Sarah Palin might decide to capitalize on the lurid misadventures of the Northstar and its right-wing cargo.
Then Navigator Holder had sat up straight in his chair, and they all watched out the storm glass as the face of Hubbard collapsed. Every soul on the bridge knew what came next, and within a long minute, the swell was rising like the relentless back of a sidelong python. In the relative shallows of Disenchantment Bay, there would be no protracted terrestrial build. It would take less than a minute for the wave to reach them.
Textbook, his mind raced. Steam into it, ride over the top. It was his only move. “Tsunami!” he called out. “Full throttle.”
His command hustled into action but not before Squier noticed the microsecond delay that comes with awe. Briggs entered the code for full ahead while Holdren sent out a terse transmission giving their position. In that span of seconds, the wave was upon them. The bow rose into it sluggishly, trembled, and then came to a full and tremulous stop. A gathering of stalled momentum gave to the forces of celestial gravity, pulling everything down and backward. If they’d ever had a chance, they’d missed it.
